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Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group
@acyig.bsky.social
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Anthropology of Childhood and Youth Special Interest Group of the American Anthropological Association

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Call for nominations! The Anthropology of Childhood and Youth Interest Group biennial book prize competition is open for nominations for a worthy representative of the field for 2024-2025.
2025 ACYIG Book Prize Call for Nominations The Anthropology of Childhood and Youth Interest Group (ACYIG) is pleased to announce our 2025 Book Prize competition. The ACYIG Book Prize Committee will award $300.00 to an anthropologically and/or ethnographically focused book published in 2024 or 2025 that is cutting-edge, well-written, and contributes significantly to our understanding of children and/or youth. Books must be single-authored or co-authored monographs; no edited volumes, anthologies, or textbooks will be considered. All books must be in English, though translated monographs will be accepted, and all authors must be ACYIG members. The first step in the process is for the author or editor to email the Prize Committee chair their nomination and address the merits of the book in terms of: (1) originality; (2) relevance to the anthropology of childhood and/or youth; (3) potential for significant impact on the field. Once the nomination is confirmed, the next step will be to send copies of the book to the five Book Prize committee members. The awardee will be chosen by early 2026, and the Book Prize Committee review of the winning volume will be included in the Spring 2026 edition of NEOS, the flagship publication of ACYIG. Nomination Letter Deadline: Friday September 12, 2025. Committee confirmation email will be sent by: Friday September 26, 2025. Books must be sent to Prize Committee by: Friday, October 10, 2025. • Please send the nomination letter by email to Ida Fadzillah Leggett, ACYIG Book Committee Chair Ida.Leggett@mtsu.edu • Within the confirmation email, nominators will receive instructions on where to send five copies of the book. • The ACYIG Book Prize winner will be announced in early 2026. Questions? Please email Ida Fadzillah Leggett at Ida.Leggett@mtsu.edu
August 4, 2025 at 11:13 AM
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See Soares' full Spotlight here: acyig.americananthro.org/spotlight-on...
In 1877, two Indigenous girls, Angela and Benedicta, were kidnapped. Taken from the countryside of Amazonas province, the girls were brought to Manaus, probably to work as domestic servants in slave-like conditions. The girls had living parents who were legally married and, although humble, had the means to raise and educate them. However, this did not protect the kidnap victims from being considered orphans and having their guardianship rights passed to strangers. How did this happen? In “Child Separation and the Stolen Generation of Brazil: Indigenous Peoples’ (Un)Freedom in Amazonia,” Ana Luiza Soares examines the systemic removal of Indigenous children in 19th-century Brazil. This article reveals how legal ambiguities and racialized definitions of orphanhood facilitated the exploitation of Indigenous, Black, and mixed-race children as unpaid domestic laborers, known as criadas de casa.​ Soares delves into the complexities of citizenship and guardianship laws, illustrating how these frameworks were manipulated to legitimize child separation and perpetuate colonial hierarchies. Orphanhood emerges as a key category in these separations—a racialized concept used to justify the kidnapping of children who had living and capable parents. Through a compelling case study of the 1877 abduction of sisters Angela and Benedicta, the article highlights the resilience of Indigenous families who navigated and contested these oppressive systems. The work traces how relational power, exercised through networks of paternalism and patrimonialism, enabled the profitable circulation of Indigenous children as domestic laborers in the households of Manaus’s elite. The narrative underscores the enduring legacy of these practices, linking historical injustices to contemporary issues of structural racism and labor exploitation in Brazil.
July 22, 2025 at 12:52 PM
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The Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group is pleased to share our latest Spotlight on Scholarship: @analuizamsoares.bsky.social Ana Luiza Soares’ powerful research into how discourses of "orphanhood" can facilitate racialised exploitation of children in the context of 19thC Brazil.
Photograph of page 21 from an 1877 court case document. The yellowed, handwritten page—composed in archaic Portuguese—contains a report by the judge overseeing orphans in Manaus, Brazil. He states that guardianship of Angela and Benedicta was granted to Joao Lourine and Emílio, whom he describes as respectable family men. The judge affirms the girls' orphan status and dismisses a guardianship claim made by their alleged father, Joaquim Tinoco.
July 22, 2025 at 12:52 PM
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The latest issue of NEOs is out - check out this collection of short articles on the theme "Playing the Game: An Anthropological Exploration of Youth, Sport, and Play"!

acyig.americananthro.org/neosvol17iss...
Table of Contents Editor’s Corner ............................................................................................................................. 4 EDITORIAL: PLAYING THE GAME: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL EXPLORATION OF YOUTH, SPORT, AND PLAY Chelsea Cutright (Meredith College) ACYIG ADVISORY BOARD UPDATE Ida Fadzillah Leggett, PhD (Middle Tennessee State University) THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY AND SPORT (FOR DEVELOPMENT) Shamira Naidu-Young (Durham University) Original Research Articles......................................................................................................... 13 BEYOND VIOLENCE AND STRESS: HOW FOOTBALL PROVIDES A SAFE(R) SPACE FOR YOUNG MEN IN JAMAICA Julia Faulhaber (University of Tübingen) YOUNG PEOPLE, STUDENTS, AND ATHLETES: COMPETITION REDEFINED IN CONTEXTS OF INTENSIFIED SCHOOLING IN SPORTS Sebastián Fuentes, PhD Franco Balaguer, MA (Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, FFyH, National University of Córdoba, UNC, Argentina) CHILDREN’S SPORTING LIFE IN CONTEMPORARY MAASAI SOCIETY............ 39 Xiaojie Tian (Institute of Health and Sport Sciences, University of Tsukuba) “NEVER SEEN A BOY WHO CAN’T PLAY”: GENDER, POWER, AND SOCIABILITY IN CHECKERS GAMES Fernanda Müller (Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro [UNIRIO]) Rafaela Nunes Marques (Catholic University of Brasília [UCB]) PLAYING WITH STONES: SOCIAL CHANGE, MOBILITY, AND MORALITY AMONG THE SCHOOLGIRLS OF HIGHLAND MADAGASCAR Valentina Mutti, PhD (University of Milan) CREOLIZATION AT PLAY: IDENTITY, JOY, AND THE REMIXING OF STATIANNESS AT THE CHRISTMAS PARADE IN SINT EUSTATIUS Nicole Sanches (Utrecht University)
July 21, 2025 at 12:16 PM
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Chapman says:
In principle, child protection services aim to safeguard children’s health and well-being. Yet, interventions may often involve a paradoxical practice: child-family separation. Removing a child from an unsafe environment makes sense in the eyes of authorities, but in a relational sense, it is children whose social lives are displaced and remade. Children are blameless, yet they are the ones to be separated from their home and community. This context offers an insightful space to learn about and appreciate personhood, care, and welfare state politics. In Japan, the use of residential care institutions is relatively high and a staple of the child protection system. In Yusuke’s Story, I chart my encounters with a young person living in group care, Yusuke, and how their journey through the social protection system indexes how displacement, resocialization, and normativity come together to create a complicated political subjectivity. Yusuke took me on a virtual tour of his childhood in urban Tokyo through Google Maps, illustrated in the above picture. I learned about his old friends, vivid memories of 3/11, and his family. He also introduced me to his secret hobby: writing short stories. He wrote one for me—a slice-of-life tale about a young person living in state care. It was in little moments of listening and being there, side by side, that I came to understand how being in state care was more than place. Being in care was about making new relationships, making sense of complex feelings, facing inequality, reframing old memories, and losing one’s sense of belonging. These insights, in turn, reshaped my ethnographic methods and writing. Yusuke’s Story is a collection of multiple, non-linear narratives on subjectivity: Yusuke’s commentary on everyday life in care, the short story as text, Yusuke’s biography, and my attempt to portray these accounts for you. All in all, this story is a partial one that speaks to a particular moment while shedding light on the nuanced …
May 13, 2025 at 9:27 AM
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The ACYIG is delighted to present our latest Spotlight on Scholarship, featuring Chris Chapman's work on how children make stories and lives in residential care institutions in Japan:
acyig.americananthro.org/spotlight-on...
In principle, child protection services aim to safeguard children’s health and well-being. Yet, interventions may often involve a paradoxical practice: child-family separation. Removing a child from an unsafe environment makes sense in the eyes of authorities, but in a relational sense, it is children whose social lives are displaced and remade. Children are blameless, yet they are the ones to be separated from their home and community. This context offers an insightful space to learn about and appreciate personhood, care, and welfare state politics. In Japan, the use of residential care institutions is relatively high and a staple of the child protection system. In Yusuke’s Story, I chart my encounters with a young person living in group care, Yusuke, and how their journey through the social protection system indexes how displacement, resocialization, and normativity come together to create a complicated political subjectivity. Yusuke took me on a virtual tour of his childhood in urban Tokyo through Google Maps, illustrated in the above picture. I learned about his old friends, vivid memories of 3/11, and his family. He also introduced me to his secret hobby: writing short stories. He wrote one for me—a slice-of-life tale about a young person living in state care. It was in little moments of listening and being there, side by side, that I came to understand how being in state care was more than place. Being in care was about making new relationships, making sense of complex feelings, facing inequality, reframing old memories, and losing one’s sense of belonging. These insights, in turn, reshaped my ethnographic methods and writing. Yusuke’s Story is a collection of multiple, non-linear narratives on subjectivity: Yusuke’s commentary on everyday life in care, the short story as text, Yusuke’s biography, and my attempt to portray these accounts for you. All in all, this story is a partial one that speaks to a particular moment while shedding light on the nuanced …
May 13, 2025 at 9:24 AM
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The title “‘Unruly’ Children” captures the main message of the book: Integrating interviews, naturalistic observations, and psychological tests from this rare archive, I tell stories of disobedient children defying parental commands, negotiating with siblings and peers and creating their own rules through moral dramas and games. These findings challenge the tropes of “obedience” and “innocence” prevalent in scholarly and public discourses about Asian children. Moreover, writing through and about fieldnotes, I connect the book’s two themes, learning morality and making ethnography, in light of children’s social cognition, and urge anthropologists (or perhaps all adults) to take children seriously. This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of re-interpreting a rare archive of fieldnotes brought me magical encounters with time and temporality, when “the ethnographic past comes to the ethnographic present via technologies of the future,” to quote a poetic comment I received from a kind colleague.
April 7, 2025 at 1:37 PM
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Xu says:
How do humans become moral persons? While we tend to emphasize how parents shape the moral personhood of youngsters, what about children’s active learning, especially learning with and from peers? What can children teach us about the nature of ethnography, and about learning and knowledge-making more broadly? My book examines these questions through a unique re-interpretation of historical fieldnotes from the first-ever anthropological study of ethnic Han children, using an innovative human-machine hybrid approach that combines ethnographic interpretation, behavioral coding, SNA (social-network-analysis), and NLP (natural-language-processing) techniques including large-language-models (LLMs). These unpublished fieldnotes were collected by the late anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf in Taiwan from 1958-1960, at the height of the Martial-Law era. Their original research was intended as an improved replication of the Six Cultures Study of Child Socialization, a landmark project in the history of anthropology of childhood.
April 7, 2025 at 1:37 PM
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ACYIG is delighted to present our latest Spotlight on Scholarship, featuring @jing-xu.bsky.social Jing Xu's "‘Unruly’ Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village." See more: acyig.americananthro.org/spotlight-on...
How do humans become moral persons? While we tend to emphasize how parents shape the moral personhood of youngsters, what about children’s active learning, especially learning with and from peers? What can children teach us about the nature of ethnography, and about learning and knowledge-making more broadly? My book examines these questions through a unique re-interpretation of historical fieldnotes from the first-ever anthropological study of ethnic Han children, using an innovative human-machine hybrid approach that combines ethnographic interpretation, behavioral coding, SNA (social-network-analysis), and NLP (natural-language-processing) techniques including large-language-models (LLMs). These unpublished fieldnotes were collected by the late anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf in Taiwan from 1958-1960, at the height of the Martial-Law era. Their original research was intended as an improved replication of the Six Cultures Study of Child Socialization, a landmark project in the history of anthropology of childhood.
April 7, 2025 at 1:37 PM
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Our latest Spotlight on Scholarship highlighting recent publications in the anthropology of children and youth: Meghanne Barker's fascinating account of children who must perform shows for benefactors in a temporary home in Kazahkstan.
acyig.americananthro.org/spotlight-on...
February 19, 2025 at 1:41 PM
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NEOS calls for papers for its Spring 2025 issue, themed "Playing the Game: An Anthropological Exploration of Youth, Sport, and Play."

Access the full CFP here: acyig.americananthro.org/neosvol16iss...
NEOS Spring 2025 Call for Papers (CFP) Playing the Game: An Anthropological Exploration of Youth, Sport, and Play The Spring 2025 NEOS issue, Playing the Game: An Anthropological Exploration of Youth, Sport, and Play, seeks submissions of anthropological and interdisciplinary research focused on children’s and youths’ experiences with sport, play, recreation, and physical activity. Sport has been described as a microcosm of what life is about, and it is understood to both shape and be shaped by social, cultural, global, political, and historical practices (Besnier, Brownell, and Carter 2018). If play is a human universal (and potentially a universal of all life; see Graeber 2014), what does sport, as the institutionalization of games and the codification and controlling of play, do? What transformative and educational elements of play are suppressed, preserved, or fostered through implementation and participation in play, in games, and in sport? This issue will draw on connections to the power and agency of children and youth to impact and be impacted by their larger worlds through sport and play, mirroring the many influences of sport mentioned above. For instance, sport is mobilized as a tool within development; we encourage scholars to ask to what ends, why, and what do children and youth who are the targets of these development ideologies do with the embodied knowledge of sport, play, and games, delivered through such programs around the globe. The hyper-focus on developing a particular type of sporting body also has ramifications for how young people discover and transform embodied sensory knowledge of movement in specific environments and the understanding of how bodies might be defined along with or against prevailing societal ‘norms.’ We encourage a broad interpretation of how sport and play are defined, inviting scholars whose work includes topics of embodied learning, institutional or structural components of sport and play, imagination, action and acti…
January 16, 2025 at 1:27 PM
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The ACYIG is delighted to share our latest Spotlight on Scholarship, featuring the radical Susan Blum's @susandblum.bsky.social new book "Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning." Get a taster via Susan's Spotlight here acyig.americananthro.org/spotlight-on...
Has schooling killed learning? Blum, Susan. 2024. Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning. NY: Cornell University Press. In Schoolishness I ask all the ways—I analyze 10—conventional institutional education leads to alienation, and then all the ways it could be better, more authentic, more joyful, more meaningful. The book is deeply anthropological, drawing on what we know about how humans learn "in the wild," and comparing this to the ineffective and often harmful schoolish ways that increasingly all humans are expected to experience in the contemporary world. The book is manifesto and tirade, pamphlet and prayer, autoethnography and annotated bibliography, lament and dream. It's about education, but it's also about psychology. And it's a moral undertaking too. As an anthropologist, I feel compelled to take them all on—as an observer and participant in this strange human experience.
January 16, 2025 at 1:21 PM
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ACYIG is pleased to announce our latest Spotlight on Scholarship, featuring Junehui Ahn's "Between Self and Community"!
acyig.americananthro.org/spotlight-on...
The Rainbow Room in Somang Preschool (Seoul) looked like the classroom I previously studied at a midwestern U.S. preschool. Walls were decorated with children’s artwork and posters. The artworks included words such as I, myself, feelings, expression, self-confidence, creativity, diversity, etc. Children were encouraged to express and verbalize their own thoughts, ideas, and feelings and were eager to do so. Based on these observations, I tentatively concluded that contemporary Korean socialization practices and ideology are geared toward cultivating children’s self-expression, creativity, and individuality—the values believed by many contemporary Koreans to be prerequisite for success in emerging, globalized South Korea. However, my conclusion changed when classroom teacher Ms. Choo approached me to share her frustrations: “Kids are just copying each other’s work and are only interested in what others are doing. No diversity and no creativity.” She specifically mentioned a girl named Nuri: “She’s too cocky. Kids think her drawings are the best … and envy her. But she doesn’t care for others’ feelings. She’s problematic.” I was surprised. Somang children’s expressions seemed diverse and creative, even compared to those I observed in the U.S. preschool. Moreover, Nuri seemed an exemplary student who was good at articulating unique ideas, thoughts, and preferences. If the teacher’s goal was to cultivate creativity and diversity, why was Nuri’s behavior and attitude problematic? Why shouldn’t kids be interested in others’ work? What kind of cultural assumptions, imaginaries, and aspirations reside behind this teacher’s laments and frustrations? Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a South Korean preschool, my book Between Self and Community examines how children and teachers navigate, construct, and reconstruct multifaceted and conflicting models of “a good child” amid Korea’s shifting educational and social landscapes. It shows how implicit local socializati…
December 9, 2024 at 3:55 PM